Kithros

That's not really true - they have better graphics because they have vastly more resources available to them. They have way more people working on the games. Personally, I'd rather have a finished version of pokemon reborn than one of GameFreak's pokemon games, so in that sense it could be considered 'better' than those games, however, as a standalone game Pokemon Reborn just wouldn't work (Pokemon Reborn relies on the actual pokemon games in that Pokemon Reborn assumes people already know how to play the game, and the difficulty curve would be way out of whack as a standalone game etc.). This game would be a disaster if anyone who wasn't already familiar with Pokemon tried to play it, so it wouldn't really be fair to compare it to the official pokemon games where they don't have the luxury of assuming people know what they're doing. It's aimed at a different demographic (that I happen to be a part of) than the official games.

... UMM, EXCUSE ME, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIDING THAT POKEMON INSIDE MY HOUSE?!

Trying to grind money is waaaay slower than voltorb flip - it's not even close. You need $200000 to be able to get 10000 game corner coins. As far as voltorb flip goes, it's a lot more time efficient when you avoid thinking about it too much - like, if you can't see any more obviously safe moves to make for more than about 5 seconds just look at whichever row and column has the most missing from it still and just go for the intersection between the 2 instead of bothering to think it through meticulously. Even if you lose a bit more often by not thinking things through, it's made up for by getting 2-3x as many games in. Also, I'd recommend using the voltorb flip solver (http://www.voltorbflip.com/) for when you get to levels 5+ - before level 5 though I feel like it takes too long to input everything into it that it's more time efficient to just guess quickly.

You have to leave the building first to talk to Shelly + Cal.

I have yet to see anyone complain on the forums about Ametrine Cave having level 50 wild spheals - and if wild pokemon can be ridiculously high leveled unevolved pokemon, then is it really such a big stretch that someone caught a level 50 wild pokemon and then traded it off without ever training it? I mean, if having level 50 unevolved pokemon is such a huge concern then there should be complaints about it in practically every high level area in the game, because there are high leveled unevolved pokemon basically everywhere that there's high level wild pokemon.

If you don't really care about your money then you can max out their happiness by buying somewhere around 40 pokesnax (they cost 400 each in the department store, don't buy the ones that cost 650) - but if you're doing this for the sake of completing the pokedex then the cost of this starts to add up a lot and might not be very practical for that. You don't need to worry about using more pokesnax than you have to because it won't let you use them anymore after their happiness is already maxed out.

The poll is pretty heavily biased in that only the forum regulars are going to be voting on it - the people who frequent the forums are mostly people who have been waiting between a lot of the episodes, where they really have nothing to do in the game other than grind so it doesn't bother them at all. I've grinded a Lucario and Metagross up to 75 once I reached the end of episode 14 since I had nothing else to do *BUT* if this were a finished game then I would've completely ignored those pokemon, played through to the end of the game and then stopped, and it would be as though those pokemon never existed even if I preferred them over the pokemon I had on my team. If the game were finished and I were playing through the game for the first time - if I'm at level 75 and there's a level 10 event pokemon, anything short of one of the insanely strong legendaries would be completely ignored by me (I wouldn't even bother for Garchomp). Sure I would level up a Garchomp right now between the episodes because I have nothing better to do, but the game should be designed for what it's going to be as a finished product, not for what it's like while people are waiting for it to be finished.

Rare candy can be bought actually, but it costs 20000 each so it's not really very practical to buy rare candy (if you really want to though they're available in the candy shop in obsidia ward). Rare candy doesn't work at all for filling this purpose though because rare candy is better at leveling up already high level pokemon than for using it on low leveled pokemon (since it takes more time to level up the higher level you are under most circumstances) - if rare candy didn't cost something absurd then people could just rare candy their pokemon to level 100 instead of using it to level their pokemon from 50 to 75 (yeah a level 100 pokemon might not obey sometimes, but a level 100 pokemon that doesn't obey sometimes is still way stronger than a level 75 pokemon).

It has a 'mega evolution' now though so it has higher base stats (and a psychic/steel typing instead of pure psychic). I don't think it's overall changed in difficulty much if at all. Anyway, you should try to get him to use hyper beam on your special attackers and then switch to your physical attackers to hit it hard while it's recharging (Abra has much higher special defense than defense - you probably won't do much damage to it with your special attackers anyway so use them as fodder for the hyper beams). Like all of the overleveled pokemon, having pokemon with sturdy or a way to paralyze them helps a lot too, but don't bother trying to use leech seed/curse/poison etc. because it has magic guard.

I don't see where the argument is even coming from if you're saying that they should be the same level as the wild pokemon - the example being given with Piplup for instance is talking about a level 50 Piplup, but there are already wild pokemon above level 50 at that point in the game - so if you're really asking for them to be around the same level as wild pokemon then you should already be voting for B. Also, not everyone will grind a pokemon just because they like the pokemon. Until I reached the end of episode 14 I almost never changed any of the pokemon I was using specifically because I didn't want to grind to bring other pokemon up to the same level as them; I switched I think only 2 of my pokemon in my team throughout the entire game, and both of those were early in the game (right before the level 75 Garchomp event where it was relatively easy to grind thanks to being able to 2v2 wild pokemon) - after that I never bothered trying to use any new pokemon because I don't play pokemon to grind, even if there were some pokemon that became available that seemed a bit more interesting to me than the pokemon I already had.

For the first one I'd go with B - realism is nice and all, but I feel like the gameplay has to be prioritized over realism (and besides, there are unevolved wild pokemon in level 60+ areas as it is - if you want to apply that logic that they should be evoled then you should also be applying taht logic to wild pokemon, otherwise you could just explain it by saying that the level 50 piplup was caught in a level 50 area instead of being trained to level 50). For the second one I'm a little bit torn - I can say that personally having been informed about it I would probably like D) the most, however, I also think that for the game as a whole that A) will probably be better for the game. I can't claim to know any statistics about it for this game in particular - but typically in games only a very small minority of players actually read the forums etc., and to the people on the forums who don't really understand the game mechanics of this game it would come across as really silly and sloppy game design. These kinds of things might seem really small, but it amounts to a lot more than you'd think - one of the things I think I've learned about game design is that if you're thinking about implementing a feature to a game, that it either has to be done right or not done at all, and these really counterintuitive mechanics aren't really good for the game. On its own it might not have that much of an impact to the game, but many small mistakes like these makes the game look really sloppy and new players or people considering playing the game can often be put off of a game by silly things like these, so I'll kind of grudgingly have to vote for A).

There's another part to it that you may have missed - if you just go to the upper section where the boulder is supposed to be before doing anything else, the boulder won't be there. Before you go there you need to read Kiki's gravestone in the wastelands (it's outside the building with the big flight of stairs iirc, but I don't remember that clearly). You might have already read the gravestone when you went through the wastelands the first time, but if you can't find the strength boulder in the upper area it's because you haven't read that gravestone.

To be fair Taunt is one of those abilities that are almost never used in game - I mean, it might have some use in competitive play, but against the AI the AI is usually so bad that any move that gets prevented by taunt was going to be practically a waste of a turn anyway (for instance, when the AI uses swords dance on a pokemon with only 10% health left..)

There are countless paths the game could take - Arceus didn't necessarily create everything for instance (as far as I can tell that's merely a rumor with no real basis to it, and even less basis for it being truly omnipotent), and additionally I never said there would actually *be* a PULSE Arceus, only that Team Meteor was trying to hook it up to a PULSE machine. That doesn't mean they'll actually succeed (for one, there's the Lin/Solaris drama that's going to come up, El might not really be a part of Team Meteor and could turn on them after they reach Arceus, Arceus itself might just do whatever it is that it does if they can't control it, or the main character + gym leaders could just stop the plan). There are many many possibilities for how the game could play out still and I'm not going to predict what will happen - but I do think it's pretty safe to say that Team Meteor at least wants to have a PULSE Arceus.

There are no bugs in existence that can learn trick room in general - I don't mean that they're just not available in reborn, there are no bugs in general that learn it. You're either going to need insanely good RNG, an insane amount of revive abuse, or pretty much an entire team completely EV trained in speed to have any chance I think (well, except maybe grinding an entire team to level 100 and just trying the fight until you get lucky enough that none of them disobey you... I think Charlotte would still 1 shot your pokemon even if they were level 100, so you'd need to OHKO her still). I mean, if you're *really* desperate, you can get enough revives/cotton candy and just revive your pokemon over and over again (preferably pokemon with sturdy/have detect etc. to reduce the cost) until the pokemon she has sent out run out of fire moves and you can set up + sweep with something..

It doesn't do anything other than change dialogue though - you don't get any different pokemon, items or anything, and you don't fight any different trainers than you would have otherwise. In strictly gameplay terms the only thing that really changes is that you don't need to beat Arceus if you side with El.

Even though Radomus is still pretty sketchy, I would have to choose Radomus over El every time - while Radomus 'might' be doing something wrong, it is guaranteed that Elias is doing things wrong (ie. trying to kidnap Gardevoir to take as a hostage definitely happened) - and if it's a question between someone who might be a scumbag vs. someone you know 100% is a scumbag, I'm obligated to pick the person who only might be a scumbag (ie. if Radomus is working with Team Meteor or somesuch then it doesn't really even matter which you pick, so at least pick the choice that in theory gives a better outcome if he isn't working with Team Meteor - I say in theory because obviously in game the choice doesn't particularly matter for anything other than dialogue and whether or not you have to beat the ditto or not). While the whole brainwashing thing with El is kind of sketchy, it seems unlikely that he actually intended for El to be completely brainwashed (I don't see what motivation he would have for making El his butler, and to immediately make El his butler without testing if the brainwashing worked in any way seems way too careless of him and I'd expect him to know better than that). I also didn't get the impression that he thought the main cbaracter + Cain would actually believe his butler wasn't El so much as he didn't really care. It's difficult to come up with why he would be motivated to do anything like this regardless of if he's being 'good' or 'evil' so I'll refrain from jumping to conclusions too quickly. I could potentially argue that he intended for El to recover from the 'brainwashing' to call over Team Meteor so he could track them back to their base and do 'something' there (hence why he asked you to go look for Luna because he said he was busy etc.) - but it's difficult to come to any reliable conclusions when there's so little information to go off of.

I got the impression that Connal did recognize her but didn't press the issue because he didn't have a death wish.

If you're using the level 1 sturdy pokemon + leech seed then you can survive indefinitely if they can't do damage multiple times in one turn to your sturdy pokemon (be that with a multi-hit move, burn/poison or whatever) - even if they recovered enough to survive the leech seed you could just run them out of PP and let them struggle to death (I don't think there's any way to get enough passive healing to outheal struggle recoil + leech seed combined, or at the very least if there is it would be completely implausible for them to set up while having any remotely decent moveset).

I just used thunder wave with an Ampharos (Ampharos could survive 1 hit from anything other than judgement, so i reloaded until he didn't use judgement) and then straight up beat him up - your pokemon shouldn't be that low level that they're not doing much damage to the Arceus as long as they get the opportunity to attack it, and he doesn't use any actual healing items (iirc he has 3 full heals but nothing that actually restores HP, so use thunder wave 4 times in a row to run him out of full heals).

Personally, I think it would be a lot better if revives were just a lot cheaper and not useable while in fights. With enough revives you can beat any fight with any combination of pokemon regardless of their levels. if you just dump enough money into them, and it's pretty silly.

The exp change in B/W was a really good change I think - in gens 1-4 the optimal strategy was always to just overlevel 1-2 pokemon to hell and forget about actually using a full team (type advantages have nothing on being able to outspeed anything of your opponents with pokemon that do 2x as much damage and can take twice as much damage as a lower level pokemon), they just toned down the levels of the opponents too much (the elite 4 had wimpy pokemon compared to any of the previous generations). The exp formula changes in gen 5 made using an entire team a lot more viable ingame than in previous generations (leveling all 6 pokemon in gens 1-4 is handicapping yourself) I've never actually played any official 6th generation games since I don't have a 3DS so I can't really comment on that much.

It might be something easy to overlook, but when you think about it it's actually pretty obvious - I mean, El is talking about how Arceus is in that tower/whatever it was where you need the 4 keys to get into it, and Team Meteor is looking for the keys, Team Meteor talks about creating a paradise/starting the world over or other similar things (and Arceus is basically the pokemon that created everything), and practically everything Team Meteor has been doing has been taking advantage of the PULSE machine to amplify pokemon powers. It's really obvious when you really think about it.

Dragon Rage. Also, I suspect beating the elite 4 as a team of level 1s would be possible even if the elite 4 were level 100s, provided you cheesed the hell out of the fights - if you remove entry hazards (or they just aren't put up to begin with), then a prankster whimsicott can leech seed a pokemon while you switch to any pokemon with sturdy and wait for leech seed to KO them (and you can revive all of your pokemon while you wait for leech seed to do this), since the leech seed will bring your pokemon back up to full health so sturdy triggers over and over again. That would be just using 2 pokemon slots to KO most pokemon they can use, so the other 4 slots would just be dedicated to dealing with anything that's difficult to deal with. A roggenrola with sturdy and sand attack could also be used to PP stall pokemon relatively cost efficiently by just using normal potions on it and use sand attack on the first turn + whenever their attacks miss, and then wait a very long time for them to struggle themselves to death (if worst comes to worst you can also use the foolproof strategy of just spamming revives until they struggle to death, but that is really expensive - it's a strategy that's pretty much guaranteed to work against anything though).

As far as I know there's no reason in game to believe that Fern was part of Team Meteor at that time - when he finds you in the cage he just says he was looking for the gym leader and can't find him. I don't see any reason to think that anything to do with the PULSE Tangrowth is really Fern's doing (and even if he were in Team Meteor at that time, it would be just as much any random grunt's fault as his fault). I mean, really, Fern doesn't actually do much of anything in the story, he just says really obnoxious things and then walks away every time. He hasn't really done anything of significance for the story as a whole - he could be completely deleted from the game and the story wouldn't even need to be changed at all except maybe the very beginning with the team meteor warehouse (but that's pretty minor too and if anything that's the time when he's least like a douchebag).